Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until then that the town awakens to life. As the sun begins to sink behind the Aspra Vouna, the streets, hitherto deserted, become thronged as though by magic; the spaces before the cafés are packed with coffee-drinking, nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all religions; the soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos and threes and fours; the clerks in the shipping-offices put on white drill jackets, and sit in chairs tipped back against their doors, and drink from tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated, appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one for all the world of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops out to chant his interminable call to prayer: “Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come to prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life and dieth not! Your sins are great; greater is Allah's mercy! I extol his perfections! Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar!” It is such a scene as one marks with the white milestone of remembrance that he may go back to it in memory in after years. Picture, if you can, a stone-paved promenade bordering a U-shaped harbour. In the harbour are many craft—all small ones, for it is too shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are caiques with sails of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; schooners, grain-laden, from Egypt and Turkey and Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails and great goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye, and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And along the quayside, where the human stream wanders restlessly, there are Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy fustanellas that make them look like ballet-dancers; swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes, wearing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare-kneed Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and feature of the ancient Greeks, swaggering along with insolent grace in their braided, sleeveless jackets and high boots of yellow, untanned leather; Algerians in graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tarbooshes and Arabs with turbans—now and then a mollah with scornful, intolerant eyes and the green turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of the Prophet—and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, from Nubia, and from the Sudan.